Yes, it would be the strife that would eat away at one, over the years, there among the parrots and the molluscs.

But let me ask you this then.

How is it that if as the poem suggests the wife of the unfortunate Old Man of Peru has recognized her mistake for what it is -- a simple mistake, the putting of him in the blast furnace of her oven, and him so sadly small -- in the drawing she should appear so, well, pleased about it all?

Lear found the humour in a life that was physically difficult. He was twentieth of twenty one children, had asthma and a weak heart and was afflicted from childhood with epilepsy, suffering repeated grand mal seizures, which caused him shame and were a factor in his withdrawing from a world in which it feels from here as though he was never really quite at home. There were long periods of severe depression which he called "The Morbids". The strange often dark sense of humour, the ultimate defense. His letters are wonderful to read.

“I was much distressed by next door people who had twin babies and played the violin, but one of the twins died, and the other has eaten the fiddle–so all is peace.”

Annie, I think many of Lear's more abstruse (to our ears) rhymes are meant to be humorous representations of the speech patterns of the English U-class of his epoch, so that "vague" and "Prague" would rhyme with the "nog" in "egg-nog".

In any case, of course, the limerick, once Lear had invested it with so so much mystery and magic (and then too, with so much sublimated meaning of so many other kinds -- not excluding that sort of meaning which comes with the sudden explosion of hot air from a punctured hot air balloon), took on a continuing life of its own.

To me it seems a form like the sonnet that demands occasional reinvention to remind us of its... dare I say intrinsic... brilliance.

And to everyone who has done their bit of madly ingenious reinventing hereabove, thanks for the unexpected smiles in the night.

(Not forgetting the other half of the total Lear package -- as WB aptly puts the matter, "he knew how to work a pen. A great sense of movement and the daft energy that perfectly matches the poems".